Something Coming Through

51. The Black Room

Mangala | 29–30 July

Chloe was taken back to the tent and shepherded into one of its sleeping compartments. One of Drury’s men gave her a bottle of water and a scalding container of microwaved lasagne. No point asking if he had something without meat in it. She peeled off her wet shoes and socks and ate a little of the cheese sauce and slippery pasta, discovered she didn’t have an appetite, drank all of the water.

She tried to map out how she could survive this, but her thoughts kept dissolving into pointless fantasies of escape. Slitting a hole in the tent when her captors weren’t looking. Somehow scooping up Fahad and stealing a boat and outrunning Drury on the river. And she kept seeing Henry, too. His blank look when he’d been shot. The bubble of blood rising in his mouth. His body hanging limp between the two men as they carried it off…

A man was standing over her, shaking her shoulder. She asked to use the toilet and was taken outside. The sky had darkened and the dust haze had thickened, obscuring the mounds and dimming the frozen scarves of light tangled overhead. The toilet was a plastic sentry-box exactly like the ones at music festivals. It had the same stink, too. Chloe squatted inside it and listened to the wind hoot and wail outside until the man who’d escorted her rapped on the door.

Drury and Tommy took her on a tour of the mounds. There were ten of them, and they walked all the way around each one, Drury asking her if she could feel anything while Tommy swept the air with a long boom wired into his tablet, taking readings of local distortions in the magnetic field. Chloe said that only the mound they’d tunnelled into seemed active, and hoped that Fahad hadn’t told them any different.

Fahad was sleeping, Drury said. After the tunnel had been cleared he had spent half the night inside the mound. ‘He looked like one of those fairground fakirs, trying to summon spirits. He was about as successful, too.’

‘We should have brought a crystal ball,’ Tommy said.

‘I should have brought a real fucking archaeologist,’ Drury said.

He was tired and irritable. Chloe hoped that it was because things weren’t going the way he planned.

She told him that Fahad needed time; Drury said that was what the kid had told him. ‘His spirit guide is still fine-tuning the fucking machinery, or some such shit.’

‘Let me talk to him,’ Chloe said.

‘No, I’ll let him rest. Then we’ll give it another go-around. And if that doesn’t work,’ Drury said, ‘you’d bloody well better be able to find some way of motivating him.’

He wouldn’t let her see Fahad’s black room, either. They returned to the tent, and she sat in the sleeping compartment and tried to ignore the stray glances of the men. The oppressive claustrophobia reminded her of The World’s Worst Holiday, a camping trip in Wales when her parents’ marriage had been splitting open. Soon to be followed by The World’s Worst Christmas, after her father walked out. It had rained every day, in Wales. Classic British holiday weather, as if global warming had never happened. Or perhaps because it had. Her father had sat under the awning of their tent drinking cheap red wine, or had disappeared on long solitary walks; her brother had mooned after some unobtainable girl; Chloe, aged seven, had been forced to accompany her mother on trips to local churches and chapels. While her mother sketched architectural details, she’d sit in a pew, reading, or sit in the church’s porch and watch rain fall amongst gravestones and crooked crosses. Later, she would have given anything to have those long quiet hours back, but at the time she’d been bored and fractious, disturbed by the tension between her mother and father, the change in the family’s emotional climate that she couldn’t, at the time, understand.

She dozed, jerked awake with a little shock. There were more men in the tent now, big animals crowding the common space. She recognised the bearded, eyepatched driver of the Range Rover, one of the men who’d been left behind to search for McBride.

‘There’s a problem,’ Drury told her. ‘Get your mask. I need you outside.’

‘What is it?’

‘Your friend Fahad is trying to fuck me over.’

She was hustled to the trench cut around the nearest mound. Two men were standing guard there. One told Drury there was no change in the situation; the other handed him a pair of field glasses.

Drury pushed his goggles up to his forehead and leaned at the edge of the trench, studying something through the field glasses. Then he gave them to Chloe and told her to take a look.

She had to stand on a plastic crate. The field glasses laid reticles and several small stacks of numbers over a hazy view of things moving through blowing dust. Biochines, different sizes. Some as big as cows, or cars. A jostling crowd circling the neighbouring mound.

‘They started to turn up after the kid arrived,’ Drury said. ‘One or two coming in at irregular intervals. My guys shot them. But a few hours ago a whole lot more came in out of the countryside, and they’re still coming in. And when I sent two of my men to pull the kid out of his hidey-hole, his black room, a bunch of those monsters tore them to pieces.’

Chloe remembered the mantis-thing in Hanna’s cage, purring like a contented cat. She said, ‘You think Fahad called them here?’

‘You’re the expert on the kid and his eidolon.’

‘You took him prisoner, he saw a chance to try to take control…What would you have done, in his place?’ Chloe said. She was angry and scared because she knew what was coming, could see it barrelling down the tracks towards her, massive and unstoppable.

‘The question is, what’s he doing in there?’ Drury said. ‘And why is it so fucking important to those biochines?’

Tommy said, ‘The signal is steady. But who knows if that means anything?’

Chloe said, ‘What signal?’

‘A broad-spectrum radio pulse,’ Tommy said, hefting something that looked like an antique mobile phone. A fat antenna protruded from its leather case. ‘It started up a couple of hours ago. The kid said his Ugly Chicken has woken something. If he’s done something else since then, it hasn’t changed the signal, but it doesn’t mean he hasn’t done something else. Just that we can’t detect it.’

‘Because you didn’t bring the right equipment,’ Drury said.

‘So sack me and send me home,’ Tommy said.

‘Maybe I should send you in there to get the kid,’ Drury said.

Chloe said, ‘I’ll go.’

The two men looked at her.

She said, ‘I mean, that’s what you want me to do. So I’ll do it.’

‘I want you to bring him out,’ Drury said. ‘Tell him that I won’t hurt him. Tell him that I’m not even angry with him. But also tell him that if he doesn’t come out, I’ll smash that precious bead of his to dust. And just in case you’re thinking of trying any funny stuff…’

He snapped his fingers, and one of his men handed him a fat length of dull olive tubing. Drury pulled at it and it suddenly doubled in length; he unfolded a gunsight at one end and a trigger mechanism at the other.

‘This is an M-80 rocket launcher,’ he said. ‘A one-shot handheld anti-tank weapon made in the Republic of Serbia. Fine piece of kit. We have six of them. And if you don’t bring that kid out in the next thirty minutes we’re going to fire every single one of them into that fucking tunnel.’

Chloe walked out into the dust and wind with a heavy feeling of inevitability. The feeling that everything in her life had led up to this point.

A little walkie-talkie was hooked to the collar of her jacket and plugged into her ear; she was carrying a torch and two bottles of water, a watch borrowed from one of Drury’s men, an ugly thing with a ridiculous number of little dials. Drury had told her that if the biochines attacked her, he and his men would shoot the nearest, give her a sporting chance to make a run for it. He did not need to say what would happen to her if she returned alone.

With guns at her back she walked towards the pit, and the alien monsters that prowled its edge.

Several dead biochines were scattered across rippled sand and broken pavements of black stone. Then she saw the first live ones, long and low and segmented, scuttling over the irregular ground. She stood stock-still, holding her breath, as one of them coiled over itself and flowed towards her, moving on a multitude of stiff spikes. Tufts of hair bristled at the joints of its armour, a pair of black prongs jutting from its rear. It circled her twice, then reared up.

She cried out. She couldn’t help it. A voice crackled on the walkie-talkie, asking her what had happened.

The biochine swayed snakelike, its head level with her face. Its underside was like a string of pale vertebrae, each bearing a pair of stiff spikes on prominent ball joints. Its head was small and complicated, with a ring of flexible whiskers twitching around a lamprey maw. It swayed back and forth, then struck with speed and precision, its mouth clamping around her left wrist, a stinging sensation, tugging, sudden release. She snatched her arm back, but the biochine was already flowing away. She remembered to breathe, and a deep trembling started in every muscle.

Her wrist throbbed.

She stripped off the camo jacket and pulled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt, discovered a mottled circle of small white blisters around her wrist, each tipped with a spot of blood. She said into the walkie-talkie, ‘Are these things poisonous?’

‘What happened?’ Drury said.

‘One bit me. Are they poisonous?’

‘I guess you’ll soon find out. Where is it now?’

‘Gone.’

‘Then why are you still standing there?’

Chloe shrugged into her jacket, zipped it up, and went on, hollow with fear and anticipation. Biochines resolved out of the blowing dust all around her. Tall, skinny black things that stalked about on two legs, with narrow heads that were mostly serrated jaws. Shelled things covered in fluorescent orange and green spines that flexed in pulsating waves. An elephantine boxy thing stumping past.

Monsters. Creatures whose logic confounded human experience.

Animated mops topped with writhing ribbons. Small hopping things that were here and suddenly there, hundreds of them seething around her. She froze, and they were gone, all at once, and she rubbed her legs and arms, wondering if she’d been bitten again.

The blisters circling her wrist warmly throbbed.

The mound loomed ahead. Biochines shifted away from her as she walked towards it. Treading carefully, her heart beating high, afraid that if she mis-stepped or tripped they might attack. She reached the shallow trench at the edge of the mound, squashed a foolish impulse to turn and wave to the men watching her.

She said into the walkie-talkie, ‘Okay. I’m here.’

She could see the mouth of the tunnel that slanted down into the mound. Clusters of rat-sized things clung spiderwise to the flaking ochre mudstone around it. Shield-like bodies, splayed legs thin as wires, clusters of eyes — she supposed they were eyes — that glowed sharp and green. She clambered down an aluminium ladder into the trench, stepped towards the tunnel mouth. Froze when the rat-spider things shifted, scurrying around and over each other, green eyes flashing and blinking.

When they stopped moving, she called Fahad’s name. No answer. She called again, said, ‘I’m coming in,’ and switched on the torch and ducked into the tunnel.

It was about a metre in diameter and roughly circular in cross section, mudstone walls sprayed with some kind of polymer or resin. Glistening like a gullet in the torchlight. Chloe crawled on hands and knees, clambered through a narrow slot between two dark straps. Beyond was a puckered opening in a dense weave of black wire. She scrambled head first into the hollow space beyond.

The black room. The oval print of the torch beam changed shape as it flowed over flat planes and sharp angles. A shadow crouched in a far corner.

Chloe pulled off her mask and said, ‘I came alone.’

‘He sent you, didn’t he?’ Fahad said. He was filthy with dust, clutching something in his left hand. A knife. No, a screwdriver…

‘Of course he did. But we can talk without being overheard,’ Chloe said.

She switched off the walkie-talkie, pulled one of the bottles of water from her pocket and tossed it to Fahad. He flinched when it smacked down, made to reach for it and then hesitated, as if suspecting a trick. Chloe unscrewed the top of the other bottle, drank. Cool water dissolved the parched taste of dust and fear. After a moment, Fahad reached out and snagged the fallen bottle and retreated.

Chloe sat on the slanting floor. One facet of an angular volume enclosed by walls of close-woven black wire. It was as chilly as metal but slightly resilient, like plastic or hard rubber. The individual strands were about the thickness of her thumb, knotted over and around each other in no obvious pattern.

She checked the borrowed watch — a little over fifteen minutes left — and told Fahad, ‘One of the things outside bit me. Tasted me. And the others let me through. So I guess Ugly Chicken wants me here.’

Fahad took a long drink from his bottle of water. He said, ‘You’re protected because he’s inside your head. A small piece of him, anyway.’

‘He made me want to come all the way out here. I felt it when I first saw this place. Felt as if I’d come home. Is that what you feel?’

Fahad nodded.

‘Did you call up all those monsters to keep you safe, or was it your friend?’

‘He wants to keep this place safe.’ Fahad paused, then said in a rush, ‘It’s happening, Chloe. It’s begun.’

‘This wonderful thing you told me about.’

‘He called to his friends.’

‘The biochines?’

Fahad shook his head. ‘Ugly Chicken is a memory of someone or something that had used this place long long ago. After he woke up, he used us to get back here. But that isn’t the end of it. He wants to go back to where his original came from. So he went inside the operating system of this place, and he called to his friends. Out there beyond the sky. In space. And one of them answered him.’

It took Chloe a moment to process that. She said, ‘Ugly Chicken called to a shuttle?’

‘To some kind of spaceship. He said it’ll be here soon. Here to take him home. He’ll help us, Chloe. He brought the biochines. And the spaceship he talked to will be here soon. Then it won’t matter about what Drury wants.’

‘Even if it’s about to land, or whatever it does, you can’t stay here any longer,’ Chloe said. She explained about the rocket launchers, and Drury’s ultimatum. She checked the watch again, said, ‘We have just ten minutes to work out what to do.’

‘He wouldn’t blow up this place,’ Fahad said.

‘Don’t bet on it. He has Rana’s bead. And this isn’t the only mound, the only spire.’

‘I told you. Ugly Chicken isn’t in the bead any more.’

‘Drury doesn’t know that,’ Chloe said.

‘And anyway, he still needs me. If he didn’t, he would have already fired those rockets into the tunnel.’

Chloe scooted closer to Fahad. ‘And what will he do when he doesn’t need you any more? When this spaceship comes? You’re hiding in here because you’re scared of him. That’s okay. I’m scared of him, too. Henry’s dead: one of Drury’s men killed him. And Drury killed your father, too. Wait,’ Chloe said when Fahad started to say something. ‘Let me finish. Drury took over McBride’s business when McBride went to prison. Drury found out that your father was dealing in Elder Culture artefacts, and that he wanted to go to work for his old boss, who’d just been released from jail. So he killed him and made a video of it, to keep other people who worked for him in line.’

‘But it was McBride who told you that.’

‘Yes, it was. And I trust him about as much as I trust Drury. But I think he was telling the truth about your father.’ Chloe paused. It was an ugly thing to ask, but necessary. She said, ‘Did you see the video? The one Jack Baines’s bosses sent?’

‘Why do you think we ran away?’

‘You saw what was done to your father. He was shot, wasn’t he?’

Fahad didn’t say anything.

‘McBride had some kind of ray gun. Henry took it off him, and then Drury took it from Henry. But before that, McBride used it on Hanna Babbel. I saw him do it. He paid her to lead Henry and me into a trap, and then he killed her. Also, when we were trying to find who had taken you, Henry found news reports about murders of men associated with McBride, all of them killed like Hanna. So if McBride had killed your father, he would have used his ray gun. It’s like his trademark. Drury lied to you, Fahad. He was scared that you wouldn’t cooperate with him if you found out that he killed your father, so he told you it was McBride.’

She watched Fahad think about that.

She said, ‘You wanted me to come with you, to Mangala. I guess that was because you trusted me. Trust me now.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘The biochines are protecting you. Forming a cordon. But suppose they could be persuaded to do more than that?’

‘I already tried,’ Fahad said. ‘I mean, I’m not stupid. I asked Ugly Chicken to chase away Drury and his men.’

Chloe said, ‘Maybe you could ask him again. Only this time, tell him what I told you. Tell him that Drury killed your father. Tell him that Henry’s dead. Tell him that we’ll be killed too, if he doesn’t help.’

Fahad said he would try again, and pressed the heels of his palms over his eyes, the tips of his fingers over his ears. Going inside himself, muttering prayer-wise, pausing, muttering again.

Chloe was watching him closely, willing him to get through to Ugly Chicken, when pure blue light shone briefly around her. It took her a moment to realise what it was. Not some new manifestation of the eidolon, but the ray gun, probably fired at its lowest setting. She checked the watch. Still five minutes to go. Either Drury was getting impatient, or he was worrying about what she and Fahad were doing. Probably both.

Fahad was still murmuring his appeal. Chloe watched two minutes tick by, something kinking tighter and tighter in her chest, and at last Fahad took his hands away from his eyes and said, ‘I don’t know if he heard me.’

‘Did you tell him that Drury wants to kill us?’

‘I tried. Okay? I tried. But I don’t know if he is listening.’

‘Let’s hope he is. Because that’s our only chance now.’